Marja McGraw - Bogey Man 01 - Bogey Nights (18 page)

“Pamela?” Chris called
. “Are you coming?”

He and
Tad were behind a stack of boxes where I couldn’t see them, so I followed their voices to the desk.

“Perfect,” I said, taking it in, in one glance
. I could see some excellent workmanship. It was definitely a very old desk, and quite large. I ran my hand over the top, pulled drawers open, and pushed things out of my way so I could see the sides and front. “Yes, it’s absolutely perfect. We’ll take it.”

“But I haven’t told you how much I want for it yet,”
Tad said.

“That’s okay
. We’ll take it.” I ran my hand over the top again with a loving caress.

Tad
and Chris glanced at each other and back at me.

“When mom’s got her mind made up…”
Mikey said without finishing his thought.

“Now, Chris, come see what else I’ve found.”

We returned to Tad’s house to figure out what we owed him. I was happy, Tad was happy, and Chris was writing a check when his cell phone rang. He stepped outside to answer it.

Coming back into the house, he said, “That was Big D
. I asked if I could borrow his truck to haul this stuff, and he’s going to meet me here. You and Mikey can head home and make room for… everything.”

Tad
laughed. “I get it. I’ve got an ol’ lady, too. She’s at the store right now or I’d introduce you.”

Pulling a business card out of my purse, I held up my hand motioning
Tad to wait a second. I crossed out the old address and wrote in the address of the new restaurant. “If you’ll stop calling your significant other your ol’ lady, we’d love to have you be our guests at
Bogey Nights
when it opens. You can have a night out and forget about money, jobs and job hunting.”

Tad
beamed. “Thanks! I think we’ll take you up on that. By the way, my ol’ lady is my wife of five years.”

Mikey held my hand while we walked toward the car.
“Mom, that was a nice thing to do.”

“Mikey’s right.”
Chris took hold of my other hand and I felt so warm and loved at that moment.

“
Tad deserved that,” I said. “He’s having money problems but he didn’t try to take advantage of us. His prices were fair. I like an honest man.”

Chris
accompanied us to the car. “Big D said he’s got bad news about Sharon and the letters. He said he’d talk to me when he gets here.”

“Oh, no,” I said
. “Sharon got to him.”

Chapter Twenty

A
rriving home, Mikey and I hurried to the backyard to check on the dogs. Since the house had been broken into, I didn’t feel very secure. I wondered what might have happened if the dogs had been home instead of at the game with us. Would they have stopped the intruder? Probably not. Knowing what good dispositions Labrador retrievers have, I figured they might have licked the intruder while he broke in, maybe even offering to help him. If we’d been home and someone tried to break in, it would have been a different story. I believe the dogs would have been very protective. I tried to act nonchalant since my son didn’t know what had happened.

Leaving
Mikey in the backyard with the dogs and knowing they’d watch out for him, I hurried into the house to see if either Janet or John had returned our calls yet. They hadn’t, but there was a message from Mikey’s Grandma Linda, my deceased husband’s mother. There was a holiday weekend coming up soon and she wanted to know if Mikey could stay with her and his Grandpa Gene over the long weekend. I called her back and said that would be fine, and we caught up on general family news. I appreciated Linda and Gene because my parents lived far from us, and Chris’s lived even farther away than mine.

While Mikey played outside with Sherlock and Watson, I began rearranging furniture to make room for my new oak bookcase
. I only had to move a few things in order to open space to the left of the fireplace. With that done, I went upstairs to make sure I’d made the bed and that our bedroom was neat and clean. After all, Big D would be helping Chris carry the oak cedar chest up there. I couldn’t help myself – I wanted to make a good impression. It wouldn’t do to have him think Chris was married to a slob.

After putting a couple of things away,
I went back downstairs and sat down on the couch to wait. I was waiting for John to call, for Janet to call, for Chris and Big D to arrive with the furniture, and mostly I waited for a brilliant idea to pop into my head concerning who killed Charles Blakely. If only it was that easy.

I didn’t actually know who the players were yet
. Chance had mentioned a boarder who’d been scary. I wondered if it could have been Sam Shipley, since his was the name on the third letter we’d found. Of course, it could have been Dudley Long.

Mikey came in with the dogs trailing after him, and I gave him a light snack to hold him over until dinnertime
. On Sundays I usually fixed a special meal, just like my mother did when I was growing up. Sunday dinner was always something interesting. On this particular Sunday, however, I decided to forego that tradition because it had been such a busy day. I set some frozen meatballs and spaghetti sauce out to defrost. I could whip up spaghetti in a hurry, and I had made both ingredients, so it would still be homemade.

“I’m going to go play catch with the dogs, Mom,” Mikey said
, licking his fingers.

“Okay
, but go wash your hands first. Oh! I almost forgot to tell you. Grandma Linda called and invited you to spend the Memorial Day weekend with her and Grandpa.”

“When is that?”

“Next weekend. I told her you’d be there, okay?”

“Yeah
. Grandma and Grandpa always take me to do something fun when I’m with them. I think it reminds them of taking my real dad places when he was a kid. They don’t act like it makes them sad though. I think it makes them have happy memories.”

“Sometimes you surprise me, Mikey
. You have good insight for a young man of your age.”

He grinned at me, bounced a tennis ball on the floor
to get the dogs’ attention, and ran out the back door. I wondered if he even understood what insight was.

The phone rang and I heard a truck pull up to the house
as I reached for it.

I answered with
my friendliest and most disarming, “Hello?” If the caller was John, I wanted to start our conversation on a positive note.

“Pamela, this is Janet
. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but I’ve been busy with another case.”

“That’s okay
. We thought you should probably know about the letters though.”

“
Your message said you found them behind a bookcase? I wonder how they got back there.”

“Personally, I think someone stashed them there
. We checked it all out, and there’s no way they could have accidentally ended up behind the bookcase.”

Chris and Big D came in carrying the cedar chest and headed up the stairs.

“What did they say? Have you read them yet?” Janet asked.

The thought had never crossed my mind that I could open the letter
s and read them – at least not more than a dozen times.

“I haven’t read them
. I wasn’t sure if you’d approve or not,” I said, oh, so innocently. “They’re still sealed.”

“
You might as well open them since you and Chris are ‘helping’ me.”

The inflection in her voice put
quotes around the word
helping
. I smiled broadly. “I’ll do that today. What do you want us to do with them?”

“I’ll come by and pick them up soon
. Maybe today, if I have the time. More likely tomorrow though.”

“Well, Janet, I should probably keep you up-to-date with what we’ve been doing
. I’m sure you need to know what’s been going on.”

“Something’s been happening?”

“We found out that a woman named Mildred Chance Murphy owned the house during the forties. She goes by the name Chance. She lives in a retirement village now and we met with her and her nephew.”

“What was she like?
She must be way up there in years.”

“She is
, and she’s pretty interesting. At ninety she still wears make-up and clothing that you’d normally see on a younger woman, and she wears her hair up in a ponytail. Her nephew mentioned that she seems to have dementia, but we couldn’t really see any sign of it. In fact, I almost got the feeling she puts on an act for her nephew – maybe to get her own way. I don’t know for sure. Her personality didn’t remind me of any ninety-year-old I’ve ever met.”

Janet turned away from the phone and said something to someone
. “Sorry. One of the guys is looking for a file, and I happened to know where it is. So go on. She’s pretty spry for an old woman, is that right?”

“I guess spry would be a good word for her
. It turns out she has a good memory of those years – and here’s the kicker – she kept excellent records about the boarders when she ran the boarding house. She even had their dates of birth and social security numbers. Chris has already started trying to track down some of the people on the list.”

I could hear Janet blow on what
I thought might be hot coffee. “I’m going to want to see that list,” she said.

“I figured you would
. Chance’s nephew made us copies of the pertinent pages. I’ll make copies for you.”

“I’ll probably want to get the original ledgers from her, but I’ll start with the copies.”

“There’s an incident I should probably tell you about, too. Someone broke into our house yesterday.”

“Did they take anything?”

“That’s the odd part. They didn’t take a thing. Blank checks and cash were sitting out and they didn’t touch those things. The TV is still here, the stereo is here, and nothing is missing. They searched the house though. Chris thinks they were after the ledger pages.”

Janet and I were both quiet for a moment
. “How could someone have known about the ledger pages?” she asked.

“I don’t know
. That’s what we’re going to try to figure out. Maybe Chance or her nephew blabbed to someone. Chris called John, the nephew, and left a message for him to call us. We haven’t heard back yet.”

Chris and Big D headed back out the front door for another load.

“Let me know what he says. And go ahead and read the letters before I pick them up. Maybe you’ll find information that will lead in a specific direction. I’ll try to come by later if I can.

“By the way, Don and I wondered if you and Chris might like to go out to dinner one night soon.”

“We’d love it,” I replied. “And when we open the restaurant, I hope you two will be our guests.”

“You’ve got a deal
. Now, I’d better get back to work. This latest case is high profile, and it’s taking up all of my time.”

We hung up just as the boys brought in the bookcase
. Mikey had apparently heard them and was now following along, trying to help.

“Where do you want this?” Davey asked.

“To the left of the fireplace,” I directed. “where I cleared some space.”

The two men carried the heavy bookcase while my son gave directions.

“Coffee table behind you, Big D. Watch it,” Mikey said. He swung his arms around like a traffic cop.

A warmness passed through my heart and head as I watched the three of them place the bookcase, stand back to see if it was straight, and then move it a quarter of an inch on one side
. I truly cared for all of them, Big D included. He was a good friend.

And then I remembered Sharon!

“What about Sharon?” I asked. “Did you tell her about the letters? Boy, that’s the last time I ask
you
for a favor.”

Big D had the courtesy to look embarrassed
. “She wormed it out of me. We were talking about the restaurant and I slipped and said something about finding things behind the bookcase. She was relentless. I couldn’t help myself.”

“Okay, okay
. I get it.” I sighed. “I’ve been on the receiving end with her before.”

“So you’ll let this one go?”
He appeared worried about my reaction.

“Yes,” I said, letting him off the hook
. “She hasn’t called me yet, so maybe
she’ll
let it go. But please be careful about what you say to her in the future.”

Yeah, she’d let it go like a dog lets go of a tasty bone
. I’d be willing to bet she was sitting at her desk figuring out her strategy even while Davey and I talked. Wait a minute! Could Sharon have broken into our house? No, she wouldn’t go that far. Would she?

Chris glanced a
t Big D and then me, and shook his head. “Pamela, we’re going to take your desk and the highboy over and put them in the office instead of leaving them here and then having to move them again. We’ll be back in about an hour.”

“Don’t forget to lock up
the restaurant when you leave,” I said.

He didn’t even bother to respond to that.

“Can I go with them?” Mikey asked.

“If it’s okay with them, then it’s okay with me.”

“Come on, slugger,” Chris said.

The door closed behind them and I took a deep breath
. “Wow,” I said to the walls, “a whole hour of peace and quiet. Whatever will I do with myself? Ah, I know. The letters.”

I heard one of the dogs bark.

“Nope, they’re fine out in the yard.”

I retrieved a letter opener
, a pad of paper and a pen from the spare bedroom and sat down on the couch with the letters. I sorted them by the incoming letters and who they were addressed to, and the outgoing letters and who’d written them. Deciding to start with the incoming stack, I picked up one that was addressed to Sam Shipley. It was the only one addressed to him.

I carefully
slit the envelope with the letter opener and began to read. It was from his sister, Karen, who lived in Michigan. She shared all of the family news with him and then wrote briefly about the war. And then she shared her big news. Frankie Dutton and she had become engaged. He’d asked her the big question in a letter she’d received the day before. I smiled when I recognized the joy she was feeling while she wrote an upbeat letter to her brother.

And I recognized information that might help us
. If we couldn’t find Sam Shipley, maybe we could find his sister Karen, if she was still in Michigan. If she’d married I could look for Karen Dutton. If things hadn’t gone the way she planned, I might be able to find Karen Shipley. It was something anyway, which was better than nothing.

I felt my own joy now as I realized that the letters might be more help than I’d imagined
. I neatly folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope, after making a note about Karen and where she might be located.

Next I picked up one of the two letters addressed to Dudley Long
. I decided to hold Blakely’s letters for last. Opening the first one I found that it was from a girlfriend named Natalie who said she was sorry for what she’d said to him and she wanted to know if they could get back together. She said if she didn’t hear from him by the end of the week, she’d understand his decision and move on with her life. She said that since he was planning to join the Navy, she felt they needed to talk before he left. I could almost feel her sadness while I read the letter. I made a note of her name on my list, folded the letter and returned it to its envelope.